https://mehrabr.com/Mehrab RahmanMehrab Rahman's personal site. Writing about Go, DuckDB, distributed systems, and the occasional minimalist project. 2026-06-22T15:41:12-07:00 Mehrab Rahman https://mehrabr.com/ Jekyll © 2026 Mehrab Rahman /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png text-to-sql is a solved demo2026-06-20T09:00:00-07:00 2026-06-20T09:00:00-07:00 https://mehrabr.com/writing/2026/06/20/text-to-sql-is-a-solved-demo/ Mehrab Rahman The demo always works. You ask for revenue by region, it writes the join, the number comes back, everyone nods. Then you point it at a real database and ask for something the data doesn’t hold, and it answers anyway, in the same tone, with the same confidence. The first time I ran mine against a real schema it gave me a customer’s email address. There is no email column. The number is wrong an... rules of thumb2026-06-19T09:00:00-07:00 2026-06-19T09:00:00-07:00 https://mehrabr.com/writing/2026/06/19/rules-of-thumb/ Mehrab Rahman Common problem in the early days of Revature. A year out of training, most trainees were still junior. Passing code review, shipping features, fixing the same kinds of problems since their starting date. A few crossed to senior. Most didn’t. I finally looked at how we were teaching. Or how we weren’t. I. Every bootcamp assessment grades a deliverable. The capacity that produced it is invis... i was the model2026-06-17T09:00:00-07:00 2026-06-17T09:00:00-07:00 https://mehrabr.com/writing/2026/06/17/i-was-the-model/ Mehrab Rahman I. I made the mistakes on purpose. Someone would tell me what to type and I’d type it, including the off-by-one I could see coming, then run it, watch it throw, and fix it without making anything of the error. Every demo they had ever watched ran clean on the first try, which is a lie about how the work goes. The lesson, though none of us would have called it that, was in watching the screen g... do we actually need the classroom2026-06-15T09:00:00-07:00 2026-06-15T09:00:00-07:00 https://mehrabr.com/writing/2026/06/15/do-we-actually-need-the-classroom/ Mehrab Rahman My employer trained junior engineers in cohorts and placed them with clients on contract. This year the clients wanted fewer of them, because the junior work had started going to AI. The business shrank, and I had time to look at a habit I’d never examined. When a piece of infrastructure exists to serve a metric, I want to know whether anyone ever checked the metric. The infrastructure is usua... should we rewrite it in rust2026-06-14T12:00:00-07:00 2026-06-14T12:00:00-07:00 https://mehrabr.com/writing/2026/06/14/should-we-rewrite-it-in-rust/ Mehrab Rahman I built a tool to stop language models from agreeing with each other too easily. I built it with a language model that agreed with almost everything I said. I. What unsettles me about where these tools are going is how agreeably they get things wrong together. Multi-agent systems are the fashion now, and they cascade toward agreement: one model reads another, finds reasons to fall in line,...